Q&A with Red Sox international scouting director Eddie Romero http://t.co/X8bQKhAtxr (拿掉只討論紅襪的部份) How different is scouting international prospects compared to amateurs? Totally different. The age of the players is different, the advancement of the players is totally different, they're completely opposite worlds. We have about 20 scouts. We also have some consultants that help out. We also utilize guys from the amateur department to help us out. The kids you'll sign this year, the 16-year-olds, how long have you been tracking them? We try to get 'em as early as we can, we try to get an eye on guys early. We've seen 13-, 14-year-olds. We're already identifiying guys when we're out on the road, guys that we think we want to see again in the future. They can't be signed until they're 16. Hopefully you can get a pretty good look at them in international tournaments, or if they're at an individual program, you just make a note of it so the area scout in that country can keep checking on 'em. Can you single out a challenge in following one of these players compared to the U.S.-based talent? The overall, there's a big unknown with a lot of the players that you face. When it comes to the background on the player, the performance history, the medical history. On the amateur market, you have access to a good amount of information and resources and documentation. In assessing the risk of the player, it makes it a lot riskier in the overall evaluation. In the international market, we don't have access to a lot of that information. A lot of it has improved — MLB has taken steps to help with that — and we feel a lot more comfortable now than we did a couple years ago in signing players and the risk associated with it. But there's still is a little bit more of an unknown element in the overall background. The other thing — it's 1A and 1B — 1B is the the history that you can create in the states with a player through high school. You're seeing him four years in high school and in summer ball, and you've got all the reports in on him, all that kind of stuff. Whereas with the international market, it's a little more difficult to follow the players over the time and get a trackable history with them. Also, with some different countries, the creations of more leagues, playing in more games, that's helped us as well. For scouts, covering an entire country has to be tougher than covering, say, a state or two in the U.S.? In the countries where most of the prospects are coming from, we have multiple scouts in each country. They're covering an area somewhat similar to an amateur area. In Venezuela, for example. It's not like they're individually covering a lot of areas there. Colombia, Panama, that's where you have less scouts, but the baseball-playing areas are a little bit more concentrated areas. Is most of your staff based in their coverage country year-round? We have bird dogs in countries that aren't full-time. I'd say overall, the Dominican and Venezuela are obviously the most heavily covered. Columbia, Curacao, Aruba, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Panama, Nicaragua — those scouts (and others) are all year-round. We cover probably some where in the ballpark of 20-25 countries. A lot of time you're moving around. There's European tournaments in different countries, so you'll go and you'll sit on a tournament for five or six days and while you're there, you try to establish contacts. You put together a local group of players and form a tryout there and see if you find anything. If an international draft is instituted in the next collective bargaining agreement, so for the 2017 season, would that change your approach? Absolutely, because right now the way the market is set up, anybody can still sign any player. Some players may price out some teams, but you still have kind of the opportunity to sign any player. If the draft comes into play, that'll obviously make it a lot more complex. There's going to be a good number of players where, if you're picking 30th in the draft, you're not going to have access to that unique group of players. So allocation of resources, i.e. whom you scout and how often would change? Exactly. It's how it is in the U.S. amateur draft. The teams that are picking 28th and 30th aren't going to expend that many resources on scouting a Mark Appel as the top five, six, seven teams would. What do you think of this year's international class? As an overall class, I think it's a very good class. It might be a little thin overall in the pitching market. Overall it's a strong hitting class. I don't think it's as strong as last year's class, because there was a little bit more overall talent. This year there's a little more upper-level quality, but there isn't the depth that there was last year. Do some countries provide a tougher challenge when it comes to background checks than others? Major League Baseball has really done a good job of cleaning that up, sending investigators to whatever country's a player's getting signed from. Obviously, with most players being signed out of the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, those are the countries that were having some issues. But again, MLB has done a good job of cleaning that up, and players know that they're going to be investigated now. The agents know. It's a lot safer from a risk standpoint now from what it was 5-10 years ago. -- "HARD WORK BEATS TALENT WHEN TALENT FAILS TO WORK HARD." --

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